Vouchers are "gimmicks" that "divide communities," Mrs. Clinton told an
appreciative audience of school superintendents.

"There is no evidence that they work. There is evidence that they drain
dollars and students from the public schools when we need those dollars and
students."

For Hillary, students are the property of public schools. Funding also
belong to public education, regardless of how badly it's spent. But much as
she admires America's ignorance factories, Mrs. Clinton believes they are
for other people's children.

When the first family moved into the White House, daughter Chelsea, then an
eighth-grader, was enrolled in the Sidwell Friends School, a tony
institution that's usually referred to with the adjective "exclusive."

Had Chelsea attended the district's public schools (which make Chechnya
seem safe), it's doubtful she'd be a junior at Stanford today. Public
education needs students, but not Bill and Hillary's student.

Her anti-voucher bombast shows how well the first lady has learned her
husband's great lesson: When it comes to political rhetoric, reality is
irrelevant. Thus Mrs. Clinton can ignore a mountain of data and declare that
there's no evidence educational choice works.

But Cleveland and Milwaukee both have thriving voucher programs that are
meeting the needs of inner-city families. (In December, the Cleveland
program was ruled unconstitutional by a judge appointed by Hillary's
husband. The decision is under appeal.) Voucher legislation is pending in 25
states.

A Harvard survey showed that parents of Cleveland's 3,700 scholarship
students are twice as likely to be satisfied with their children's education
as public-school parents.

Another study, this by researchers at Indiana University, found students in
the program for two years had gains of 12.5 percent in language arts and
11.1 percent in science on standardized tests.

By why look that far afield. Take New York City, of which Mrs. Clinton may
have heard. It's on the tip of the state the carpetbagger wants to represent
in the Senate.

New York's taxpayers spend $10,000 annually to miseducate each of the 1.1
million students in its public schools.

This profligacy has bought schools where half of the students read below
grade level, where last year 52 teachers, and administrators at 32 schools,
were caught helping students cheat on tests to boost overall performance,
and where a frustrated Mayor Giuliani said the best thing to do with the
system would be to blow it up.

Several years ago, New York's Cardinal John O'Conner challenged the city:
Send me the lowest-performing five percent of your students and I'll educate
them in our parochial schools, which presently have a 60 percent minority
enrollment.

No one took him up on the offer, and little wonder. The city's parochial
schools spend about $4,000 per pupil, less than half the cost of public
education.

As documented by Sol Stern, education writer for the Manhattan Institute's
City Journal, in 1996 Catholic schools had a four-year graduation rate of 95
percent, compared to 25 percent in the public schools.

In that year, 75 percent of parochial-school students took the college
admissions test and scored an average of 815. The 16 percent of the city's
public-school students who took the test scored 640 on average.

Even someone who'se been sheltered in the White House and Arkansas'
executive mansion for the past two decades can see that by every measure
private education does more for less.

That's why vouchers terrify the teachers' unions and their political
muscle. They are determined to keep the human resources from escaping the
educational gulags constructed for them.

Thus, choice is for the nation's ruling elite like the Clintons, not for
poor black and Hispanic parents. Their children are the fodder needed to
maintain America's public-school monopoly.

In return for reflexive oppoistion to educational opportunities (the
mindless mouthing of moth-eaten cliches), teachers' unions provide the votes
for candidates like Hillary Clinton, who will say anything, however absurd,
to earn their
gratitude.